Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday March 25, 2013 @09:38AM
from the spread-the-wealth dept.

cold fjord writes "It looks like deep sea exploration may pay off big time as Japanese scientists have located rich deposits of rare earth elements on the sea floor in Japanese Exclusive Economic Zone waters, following up on their find two years ago of huge deposits of rare earths in mid-Pacific waters. The cumulative effect of these finds could significantly weaken Chinese control of 90% of the world supply of rare earth metals, which the Chinese have been using to flex their muscles. The concentration of rare earth metals in the Japanese find is astonishing: up to 6,500 ppm, versus 500-1,000 ppm for Chinese mines. The newly identified deposits are just 2-4 meters below sea floor which could make for relatively easy mining compared to the 10+ meters they were expecting... if they can get there. The fact that the deposits are 5,700 meters deep means there is just one or two little problems to resolve : 'A seabed oil field has been developed overseas at a depth of 3,000 meters. . . But the development of seabed resources at depths of more than 5,000 meters has no precedent, either at home or abroad. There remains a mountain of technological challenges, including how to withstand water pressure and ocean currents and how to process the mining products in the ocean, sources said.'"

...the Chinese don't have a monopoly exactly. They just undercut the prices any time anyone else tries to operate. I don't know why that wouldn't work against the Japanese as well. But the Chinese can't do it forever, and we all benefit from their cheap REM in the meantime.

That was over half a century ago, and it's funny that while you give the SK troops a pass for a war that ended half a decade before, you neglect to consider that the Chinese were coming fresh off a brutal civil war that only ostensibly "cooled down" some months earlier.

Regardless, it would be absurd to judge the modern PLA on the performance of its first generation who are all retired or dead.

The Chinese have a lot of soldiers, but no where near the best military.

All three of those are under the protection of the actual best military in the world. China will not risk a shift ass kicking by the USA and her allies.

When the enemy has a near inexhaustible supply of men, a large and relatively easily dispersed armaments industry, a vast expanse of territory in which to bog your troops down in asymmetric warfare (which into the bargain is a Chinese national sport) and a complete disregard for casualties I think you''l find quantity trumps quality. Try to imagine Iraq, except an couple of orders of magnitude bigger against an enemy that can manufacture his own small arms, guided munitions, tanks, aircraft and even nuclea

The Chinese have invaded Taiwan several times. Koxinga did it successfully with a relatively small force in 1661, and Chiang Kai Shek did it again in 1949 (and yes, that was an invasion, since the islanders didn't want him there and his forces proceeded to initiate a political persecution rivaling the mainland's in viciousness if not scale that lasted generations). The reasons the communists couldn't immediately invade Taiwan were many, though primarily it was because they first had to consolidate their power on the mainland vs. remaining resistance pockets and they had to rebuild a navy since the KMT had taken as much of it as they could (which they used to harass the nascent PLA navy and merchant marine as much as possible, retarding immediate growth). By the time the communists were ready, geopolitics had shifted such that the US was ready to support Chiang and the KMT for the foreseeable future.

Today the PRC has the capacity to invade Taiwan absolutely, but they don't want to risk war with the US to do it, especially since they've figured out they can just buy people like Ma Ying Jeou to secretly dismantle ROC sovereignty in closed-door meetings. Reunification lies down that road, but it will be on the PRC's terms, by and large.

Maybe YOU should define "best military". Time and again, our military is sent overseas to - do what, exactly? Make the world a safer place? To police? To win hearts and minds? To build nations? And, when was our last victory?

Even when we actually win a military encounter, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, our politicians leave the military machine in place, in pursuit of impossible peripheral missions. In a war of attrition, being best is pointless. The numbers will win, eventually.

Yeah I bet they're still running scared after their little experience in Vietnam. Oh wait...
Yeah but that was 40 years ago, America is hell good at war now dude. Just see Afghanistan for example. Oh wait...

This is no longer true. China has spent the last two decades building up a large modern navy. The newer ships have comparable systems to anything the US has, and they recently launched an aircraft carrier with plans to build two more. Even the pentagon admits if China was "willing to pay the diplomatic and economic price" we could not stop them from taking Taiwan.

Based on the way they do it now, yes. But it doesn't have to be. we've proven that you can mine an area for valuables, then restore the environment to its previous ecological state after. No toxic sludge. No buried waste. After you've taken what you want out, you put the leftovers and some filler back in. The reason it's toxic and polluting is because it's more profitable to be toxic and polluting, not because it's not feasible.

Problem with this approach is that there are few if any chemical processes that would not have extremely toxic by-products in rare earths mining. Environmentalists like to claim that they exist, but they usually either simply do not work at all, or have severe caveats attached that environmentalists tend to just ignore because they're not in line with ideology.

Also, when you "put things back in", what exactly do you do when these things seep into ground water and poison the area? I have barely any knowledge

A big part of it has nothing to do with scarcity of "rare earths". From what I recall, "rare earth" simply means it is rare to find them in concentrations such as deposits or veins and the like. It also has little to due with "resource" cost.

The mining cost, specifically the environmental cost of that mining is why China is #1. No one else whats to mortgage their environmental future.

Not only is it a very dirty to extract (see lots of extraction for little material), but in order to process (see sorting all

They're simply called that. The reason why the Chinese has a huge monopoly is their cheap labor and lack of safety regulations. The US had plenty of mines for this stuff but they were shut down due to the cheap abundant supply.

We have plenty of rare earths in the USA. Only the absurd policies regarding treating thorium (which has a 14 billion year half life) as a dangerous nuclear waste, requiring prohibitively expensive disposal, keeps us from taking advantage of those resources. note: Coal fired power plants get to treat the radioactive nuclear material in their fly ash as a natural byproduct and so are completely unregulated.

This one gets YouTube propaganda from the thorium reactor proponents and some of their websites. Why is it that, at least in terms of web presence, the only people concerned about this care more about thorium than rare earth minerals?

Powdered thorium metal is pyrophoric and will often ignite spontaneously in air. Natural thorium decays very slowly compared to many other radioactive materials, and the alpha radiation emitted cannot penetrate human skin meaning owning and handling small amounts of thorium, such as a gas mantle, is considered safe. Exposure to an aerosol of thorium, however, can lead to increased risk of cancers of the lung, pancreas, and blood,[citation needed] as lungs and other internal organs can be penetrated by alpha radiation. Exposure to thorium internally leads to increased risk of liver diseases. Thorium is radioactive and produces a radioactive gas, radon-220, as one of its decay products. Secondary decay products of thorium include radium and actinium. Because of this, there are concerns about the safety of thorium mantles. Some nuclear safety agencies make recommendations about their use.[85] Production of gas mantles has led to some safety concerns during manufacture.

Come on. These rare earth mines aren't going to concentrate a bunch of thorium and burn it or dump it in some building's air ventilation system. It'll get dumped in a tailings pile or pond, and pretty much sit there until such time as thorium actually becomes a valuable element to extract.

Wow, I'm out of mod points someone please mod parent up! Our regulations in this country need some overhauling.

I agree, Parent definitely need the 5 score.

The EU are in the same boat, and right now they are fighting about allowing Greenland to mine their deposits. IIRC some idiot even suggested that since the Chinese are so good at mining the stuff, they should sell the mining rights to them...

I'm fairly sure that the reason China controls 90% of the market is because they're actually mining their deposits, not because they are the only ones who have deposits. I think there are plans in the U.S. to restart some mines, and surely this is the case elsewhere too. There was a time when it was very uneconomical to run these, so they were mothballed.

On 14 January 1895, during the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan incorporated the islands under the administration of Okinawa, stating that it had conducted surveys since 1884 and that the islands were terra nullius, with there being no evidence to suggest that they had been under the Qing empire's control.[13] After China lost the war, both countries signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki in April 1895 that stipulated, among other things, that China would cede to Japan "the island of Formosa together with all islands appertaining or belonging to said island of Formosa."

Wiki [wikipedia.org] goes on to list some of the complications, but western powers had nothing to do with Japan taking control of it. Also noteworthy: China only asserted it's claim to the islands after oil was found there.

After it was discovered in 1968 that oil reserves might be found under the sea near the islands,[4][5][6][7][8] Japan's sovereignty over them has been disputed by the People's Republic of China

So, yeah, the US and the brits, and other western countries were assholes about claiming and trading land that wasn't theirs when it's in their strategic interests, much like all nations attempt to do, and much like China is doing here. "We included these uninhabited islands in our maps in the 14th century, so clearly the oil is ours!"

GGP was insinuating that America or Britain took the islands away from China and gave them to Japan. Which isn't the case. Japan took them herself. Whether later treaties affected Japan's claim doesn't change the fact that the west wasn't divvying up land to start a conflict in this case.

read history books about Americans and Brits making shit up and giving away things they have no right to give away in the first place.

That makes it all better, then. Please disregard all current wrong-doings because a country somewhere once did something wrong to another country at some point in history. Thank you for your insight in this matter.

The problem here is competing with China's willingness to pollute the absolute living fuck out of their own back yard, to refine the ores cheaper than everyone else.

If Japan and the West wanted to do something REALLY useful -- find refining methods that are less polluting and resource intensive -- or find substitute substances and processes to avoid the need for rare earth metals completely.

it's not just that. The rare earths in China don't have to be refined as much as the stuff found pretty much everywhere else on earth. I don't remember the term, but a metallurgist friend explained it to me once, saying that hands down China is at the front of the pack because of this.

So, I'd be interested to know if the rare earths (and I know, there are many substances under that umbrella) found here are of a similar purity to the ones in China or the ones in the States.

The issue with rare earth metals has never been access to them, contrary to the article, but cost. If it were simply a matter of access, the United States, Australia and other nations have massive supplies. However, producers in those nations were driven out of business because the cost of extracting them in a clean, (relatively) environmentally friendly manner was simply not competitive with the Chinese, who can afford to undercut foreign producers due to their notoriously lax environmental regulations. Now this new methodology may be helpful in that it drives down the cost of production to become competitive again, but I am concerned that it may create tremendous environmental damage.

Well, the answer is right there, given sufficient time the problem will solve itself due to toxic build up. Eventually the deposits in China will become unworkable due to the lethality of the environment and the impossibility of cleaning it up. 15,000 dead pig agree? with this outcome, considering the level of corruption, what really killed and contaminated them to the point where they couldn't be corruptly slipped into the system. The cost of cleaning this crap up can often far exceed any revenue generate

The problem with rare earths is that they are usually found in conjunction with radioactive ores, particularly containing thorium.

This makes recovery and refining a nasty and if you insist on environmental safety a quite expensive job.

China has been willing to do it on the cheap for the rest of the world. More recently they have realized that other nations have been exporting their environmental issue to China by buying cheap Chinese rare earths. This is coming to an end as China sensibly restricts exports of these materials.

> China has been willing to do it on the cheap for the rest of the world. More recently they have realized that other nations have been exporting their environmental issue to China by buying cheap Chinese rare earths. This is coming to an end as China sensibly restricts exports of these materials.

Economics of the moment is all it is. A few years from now and the price of this shit will go up to the point where a serious look will be taken at refining it domestically while the Chinese refuse to roll over

Recent advances in power electronics mean that Switched Reluctance motors are better for EVs and windmills, and cheaper.http://powerelectronics.com/content/case-switched-reluctance-motorshttp://www.radicalrc.com/blog/?p=2513

Finally another use for the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a ship built in the 70's under the guise of underwater mining but actully used by the CIA to raise a sunken sub. My daily dose of Irony is now complete.

Probably not news many people here are aware of, but China, and in some cases Russia, have been claiming islands owned and even occupied by Japan are theirs. Most significantly, China claims Okinawa and asserts that Okinawans are genetically Chinese.... therefore... well you get the idea.

"Japanese scientists have located rich deposits of rare earth elements.. The cumulative effect of these finds could significantly weaken Chinese control of 90% of the world supply of rare earth metals, which the Chinese have been using to flex their muscles."

How is China forcing the US to buy cheap rare earth elements from China? link [minyanville.com]

Again the unfortunate name of this group of elements comes back to bite us. Rare earth elements are not rare, they simply don't occur in high concentrations. There are exploitable deposits all over the world, but nobody wants to mine them because the process of extracting what you're after makes a big mess. That made China the perfect place for RE production because until recently they didn't seem to care about that.

The Chinese haven't been using "rare earth hegemony" to flex their muscles. The Chinese have correctly identified rare earths as an important strategic resource, and therefore aren't in a hurry to sell them at bargain basement prices to whoever wants them.

This of course, has put the people who like buying rare earths cheaply into a snit, and caused them to put their spin machine into action to demonize this as some kind of belligerent act.

Japan, Philippians, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and all other local Island Nations fall in Chinese territorial waters; Therefor, they are part of China. Also, China's Pacific economic zone includes Midway and the Hawaii Islands; Hence, China can fish-out those waters to feed China. Who pwns UBaby? CHINA!

Any attempts by Japan or others to mine rare earth metals in the China Sea [AKA: South Pacific] or the Pacific China economic expansion zone will be removed forcefully from the Pacific.

That's basically space technology - building autonomous vehicles operating in extreme conditions doing useful work. Almost like space mining, although in a different environment. For the Japanese, this could be their equivalent of the Apollo project. I find it an interesting technical challenge. But you're right that if rare earth elements are the only thing to be extracted from these seabeds, they'll end up with huge piles of tailings. Well, I guess that would be one of the the tough tech problem to crack...

I guess the problem lies in the ecological effect of possible dispersion of the materials over large areas of the ocean. It's not like finely-grained materials don't create a freely-floating suspension in water. Although I guess that one could say that you have to solve the problem anyway, otherwise the machines won't be able to see where they are working, due to all the turbidity around them.

Bollocks. Just call the guys from "Bering Sea Gold". They will just get down there and suck up all the Rare Earths....all with the drama that we all love...
Show name: "Japanese Exclusive Economic Zone Waters Rare Earths" , or JEEZWRE (working title)

Can you point to a place in space that has the concentration of minerals you want, and is as easily and cheaply accessible as the ocean?

Comparatively? Yes. We know that a significant portion of the asteroid belt bodies are M-type asteroids with very high concentration of iron and nickel. (Just try to imagine a 200 km-sized mountain of virtually pure iron [wikipedia.org].) If you're in space and need large volumes of structural materials for space use, an M-type asteroid is the place to go. After a certain point, it's going to be cheaper that lifting steel from Earth's gravity well.

So which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of aerogel?
Who cares, my question is how did you fit an entire pound of aerogel in that room?

A pound of lead. No, really, unless you are weighing in a vacuum.

Think of weighing a pound of lead and a pound of wood underwater. The lower density of the wood and the weight of the water displaced makes for the difference. The same holds for air, but for most substances the difference is undetectable. However, lead vs aerogel is easily detectable. By my rough calculations, at room temperature, 1lb of lead weighs 0.99989418lb allowing for air displacement and 1lb of aerogel (at 1.9kg/m^3) weighs 0.36842105

People proposing mining asteroids aren't proposing returning the materials they mine to Earth.

Actually, some of the reporting of the prospects for asteroid mining does sound as if the reporters think that returning materials to Earth is part of the point. There's not a huge amount of point to reporting that your 200km "mountain of iron" contains several thousand tonnes of platinum or gold, other than to make people think about selling the "precious metal" on Earth.

Ignorant troll, I'll feed you. If you are in space you want to get the materials from space, i.e. somewhere with a gravity well that is not as bad as Earth. Maybe the moon is good. Asteroids will be useful due to Zero-G which may allow much lower cost exploitation, and many are nearer outer destinations. Plus we will spend more time on mapping asteroids that come near Earth which is a good side benefit spaceguard-wise. There exist ideas for exploitation of space resources that once started can be self-fulfi

What a douche comment. You can't possibly know what might be found in all those asteroids. There is every reason to suspect that there are rare earths in some of them. There might even be a huge asteroid with such concentrations that it will satisfy our needs for the next thousand years. Exploration is what locates such things.

Obviously, you are opposed to space exploration. Is there a reason for that? Are you afraid of the unknown?

They have lots of samples, so they have a pretty good idea of what can be found.It's possible there are unexpected pockets of concentrations, but it's rather unlikely as those big rocks weren't formed in significant gravity wells that could cause the density based separations. Nor does it appear that they were formed with the same kind of thermal convection type actions that affected Earths geology either.

No, I'm not a geologist, but come on, don't people stay awake during the high school science classes? Or ever catch one of the various educational channels shows on the formation of the solar system?

It's possible there are unexpected pockets of concentrations, but it's rather unlikely as those big rocks weren't formed in significant gravity wells that could cause the density based separations.

Some of them must have been. It's not like the metallic ones were formed by simple agglomeration of undifferentiated material. And even if the interesting stuff wasn't in the core, now flying around naked and in pieces, the other pieces (of the former crust of those large bodies, now destroyed) must still be out there somewhere. I wouldn't lose hope, there are thousands of these bodies, you never know what interesting things we're going to find there. Remember, nature is often more surprising than any ficti

Actually, we can expect to find much higher concentrations of heavier elements in asteroids and other space debris than we do on Earth, thanks to this thing called "gravity". Neil deGrasse Tyson explains it very well in the conversation he had with Joe Rogan. Look it up on Youtube.

You have a good point if we're talking about fishing in the breakers or picking up driftwood along the beach. 5000 meters down is a much different story. It's not exactly just like picking up a rock from the bottom of the swimming pool, only deeper.

How are they going to do that? It's in the Japanese Exclusive Economic Zone, did you read the article or just jumped to posting a reply for the sake of trying to appear clever? They can't clam it but they could just setup shop and start mining, and the Japanese and US and anyone else can park right up next side them.

If the Chinese set up a mining operation in the Japanese exclusive economic zone, the Japanese and Americans would park a bunch of warships in the area. Exclusive economic zones are claimed by nations for their exclusive use. Outside countries can't just set up mining/fishing or any other operations there.

The so-called "rare earths" aren't all that rare, the problem lies in the fact that geology-wise, they don't tend to form highly concentrated ore deposits, and basically have to be mined as less-concentrated admixtures in ores of other elements.